Refutation of New Scientist’s Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

The Darwin–Hitler connection

Ed. Note: this is the first instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist
anti-creationist diatribe (see introduction and index page).
This one deals with a substantial section in the article, which tries to downplay
the Nazi reliance on Darwinian theories, and instead tries to smear Christianity
as a cause of the Holocaust. This is another clear example of New Scientist’s
atheopathy.1

Hitler photo by NARA, Darwin photo by TFE Graphics

Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide

Darwin’s ideas have been invoked as justification for all sorts of policies,
including some very unpleasant ones. But evolutionary theory is a descriptive science.
It cannot tell us what is right and wrong.

Rather than attack evolution directly, some try to tar it by association. The claim
is often made that the theory of evolution leads inevitably to eugenics and to atrocities
like those perpetrated by Hitler. These claims are irrelevant to the reality of
evolution and are also largely untrue.

The following passage is often quoted by those who accuse him of supporting eugenics:
‘It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads
to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself,
hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.’

‘…If we were to intentionally neglect the weak and the helpless, it
could only be for a contingent benefit, with overwhelming present evil. Hence we
must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving
and propagating their kind…’

‘Sounding more like Colonel Blimp than Lieutenant Columbo, Darwin envisions
a far grimmer future for races or sub-species less fit than the Anglo-Saxon. ‘At
some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races
of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout
the world,’ he predicts. ‘At the same time the anthropological apes
… will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies
will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state
… even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of now
between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.’‘

Eugenical Christians

There is no doubt that some of those who supported eugenics cited Darwin’s
theory of evolution as inspiration or justification, but then
evolution has been invoked to support all kinds of notions and schemes,
from communism to capitalism.

Biology tells us what is, not what ought to be. It is descriptive, not prescriptive
or normative. It can inform our decisions by telling us what the likely outcome
of different actions will be, but not which of these outcomes are ethical or desirable.

In retrospect, it is clear that many of the eugenic policies implemented in the
early 20th century were based as much if not more on racial and social prejudices
than on any understanding of genetics and evolution. Some may have used evolutionary
theory as an excuse, but that does not make it the cause.

Yet eugenics was founded by leading evolutionists, who used evolutionary ideas to
justify it. It flourished strongly in America, as documented by Edwin in his book
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
(see review).

The shocking results of the eugenics program included laws against so-called mixed-race
marriages in 27 states, human breeding programs, forced sterilization of over 60,000
US citizens and even euthanasia. Eugenics was even allowed by the Supreme Court,
which had once declared slaves to be non-persons and now denies humanity to unborn
babies.

Ideas and funding from American eugenicists also inspired German eugenics research,
which culminated in Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments on inmates at the
Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz.

The American Eugenics Society began in 1922 and lasted as long as 1994. Famous evolutionist
scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky was its chairman of the board in 1956, and also
included ardent evolutionist scientists J.B.S. Haldane and Richard Lewontin as members.

Eugenics was also promoted by the evolutionary textbook involved in the Scopes Trial,
Hunter’s A Civic Biology. This book also promoted white supremacist ideas.

‘At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of
man, each very different from the others in instincts, social customs, and, to an
extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa;
the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the
Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan and the Eskimos;
and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized
white inhabitants of Europe and America.’

What’s more, many of the most enthusiastic promoters of the eugenics movement
in the US, which led to policies such as compulsory sterilisation, were evangelical
Christians. As Mary Teats explained in her book The Way of God in Marriage:
‘The great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind,
deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards and moral
perverts are very poor material with which to ‘subdue the world’, and
usher in the glad day when ‘all shall know the Lord’.’

Despite the atheopathic mendacity of New Scientist, it was the liberal
(pro-evolution, Bible-disbelieving) churches that supported eugenics, while the
evangelical ones opposed it. Christine Rosen documented this in her book
Preaching Genetics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.2 She writes that eugenicists:

‘included Protestants of nearly every denomination, Jews and Catholics, and
they overwhelmingly represented the liberal wings of their respective faiths. …
They were the ministers, priests, and rabbis who were inspired by the developments
of modern science and accepted much of the new historical criticism of the Bible.
… Supporters ranged from high-ranking clerics to small-town ministers in
the Methodist, Unitarian, Congregational, Protestant Episcopal, Baptist and Presbyterian
churches.’3

‘In eugenics, these men found a faith stronger than their Christianity, fulfilling
Francis Galton’s hopes of replacing religion with eugenics.’4

‘Looking back one might expect to find a little more hesitation from religious
leaders before they offered their support to a movement that … replaced God
with science as the shaper of the human race.’5

In contrast, she documents:

‘Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility
opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection
of this most modern science.’6

Christian anti-semitism?

As for the Holocaust, the murder of able-bodied and able-minded people solely on
the basis of their religion can hardly be called eugenics. It is incredible to blame
Darwin while overlooking the role of Christianity in
fostering anti-Semitism over the centuries.

Whatever fostered anti-Semitism was not Christianity, considering that Jesus and
all His disciples and all NT authors (including Luke) were Jewish. And just consider
Romans 9–11, for example, written by the Apostle Paul
(himself a Jew).

While CMI is not Catholic, I find that the book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope:
How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by Rabbi David Dalin7 provides incontrovertible proof of pro-Semitism
in the Roman Catholic Church, and that Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), saved far
more Jews than Oskar Schindler—Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide argued that
Pius ‘was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as
860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands’, compared to the 1200 on ‘Schindler’s
List’. One
review states:

‘Rabbi Dalin also notes that prominent Catholics who were honored for their
efforts on behalf of the Jews have pointed to Pope Pius XII as the inspiration behind
their actions. The future Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, while still Cardinals Roncalli
and Montini, respectively, received high praise for their efforts to shelter and
rescue Jews. In both cases, the future pontiffs shrugged that they were just following
the orders of Pope Pius XII. Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, who hid many Italian Jews
for several months in 1943 and 1944, was honored by Yad Vashem in 1985 as a “righteous
Gentile”. Cardinal Palazzini emphasized that “the merit is entirely
Pius XII’s, who ordered us to do whatever we could to save the Jews from persecution.”

‘It was partly because of his sympathy for the Jews and his opposition to
National Socialism that Pius was in fact strongly disliked by the Nazis; Hitler’s
regime actually lobbied against the election of Pacelli to replace Pius XI as pope.
Pacelli was referred to as Pius XI’s “Jew-loving” cardinal. Rabbi
Dalin points out that “of the forty-four speeches Pacelli gave in Germany
as papal nuncio between 1917 and 1929, forty denounced some aspect of the emerging
Nazi ideology.”

‘As Cardinal Pacelli he had played a central role in the drafting of Mit Brennender
Sorge, Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical condemning Nazism. His inaugural encyclical,
Summi Pontificatus (1939), made clear the incompatibility of National Socialism
with the Catholic faith. The New York Times headline read, “Pope Condemns
Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism.” Allied aircraft even dropped some 88,000
copies of the Pope’s document over Germany in order to undermine the Nazi
government.’

‘We share in the grief of humanity … . When fearful martyrdom came
to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the pope was raised for
the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great
moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace.’

During the war, Jewish leaders who praised Pius included Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi
of Israel; Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president; and Moshe Sharett,
later Israel’s second prime minister.

Image wikipedia.org

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

In 1543, for instance, Martin Luther wrote a booklet called On the Jews and Their
Lies calling, among other things, for Jews to be expelled or forced to
do manual labour, and their synagogues and schools burned. The booklet was displayed
at Nazi rallies.

Yes, we all know about Luther’s disgraceful attacks on Jews late in his life.
They should not be condoned, but Luther’s antisemitism was totally different
to Hitler’s. Luther trashed anyone he saw as an opponent of the Gospel,
and his choicest barbs were for the papacy. For example, his debates with
Roman Catholic politician and writer Sir Thomas More included overtly
scatalogical language on both sides.39
Luther was certainly capable of trashing Gentiles:

‘The Jews crucified Christ with words, but the Gentiles have crucified him
with works and deeds. His sufferings were prophetical of our wickedness, for Christ
suffers still to this day in our church much more than in the synagogue of the Jews;
far greater blaspheming of God, contempt, and tyranny, is now among us than heretofore
among the Jews.’ [Table Talk, ’Of Jesus Christ’, CCIV]

But nothing Luther said has the slightest indication about mass murder of Jews,
and certainly nothing about murdering the disabled, Slavs and gypsies; or for that
matter eugenics, euthanasia and the other Nazi barbarities. Hitler cared nothing
for the Gospel, and killed Jews just because they were Jews, including
quarter of a million Jewish Christians. Luther’s goal was baptism
of the Jews, not genocide. For example, even in his rant against
the Jews, Luther said towards the end:

‘Thus the dear Son of David, Jesus Christ, is also our King and Messiah, and
we glory in being his kingdom and people, just as much as David himself and all
children of Israel and Abraham. … “If we live, we live to the Lord,
and if we die, we die to the Lord”; that is, we will also live after death,
as we just heard, and as St. Paul preaches in Romans 14:8. We look for no bloodthirsty
Kokhba in him, but the true Messiah who can give life and salvation. That is what
is meant by a son of David sitting on his throne eternally. The blind Jews and Turks
know nothing at all of this. May God have mercy on them as he has had and will have
on us. Amen.’

Luther’s standard biography states:

‘Luther was sanguine that his own reform, by eliminating the abuses of the
papacy, would accomplish the conversion of the Jews. But the converts were few,
and unstable. When he endeavored to proselytize some rabbis, they undertook in return
to make a Jew of him. The rumor that a Jew had been suborned by the papists to murder
him was not received with complete incredulity. In Luther’s latter days, when
he was often sorely frayed … he came out with a vulgar blast in which he
recommended that all Jews be deported to Palestine. Failing that, they should be
forbidden to practice usury, should be compelled to earn their living on the land,
their synagogues should be burned, and their books including the Bible should be
taken away from them.

‘One might wish that Luther had died before ever this tract was written. Yet
one must be clear as to what he was recommending and why. His position was entirely
religious, and in no respect racial.’8

The rise of anti-semitism in 19th Century Germany was due to evolutionists
like Teodor Fritsch (1852–1933). He was a notorious promoter of Aryan racial
supremacy and author of The Handbook of the Jewish Question aka the Anti-Semitic
Catechism, which was read by millions in Germany. As examples of his evolutionary
teachings, he wrote:

‘The preservation of the health of our generation belongs to our
highest commands … .We do not approve of false humaneness. Whoever
aims at preserving the degenerate and depraved, limits the space for the healthy
and strong, suppresses the life of the whole community, multiplies the sorrow and
burden of existence, and helps rob happiness and sunshine from life.’9

‘Morality and ethics arise from the law of preservation of the species, of
the race. Whatever insures the future of the species, whatever is suited to raise
the species to an ever higher level of physical and mental perfection, that is moral.’10

As further evidence that Christianity, Lutheran or otherwise, had nothing to do
with Nazism, take the famous evolutionist Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), who grew
up in early 20th-century Germany. He testified that biblical Christianity
was virtually non-existent, which is not surprising in the birthplace of
liberal theology:

‘Curiously, I cannot pinpoint the age at which I became an evolutionist. I
received all of my education in Germany, where evolution was not really controversial.
In the gymnasium (equivalent to a U.S. high school), my biology teacher took evolution
for granted. So, I am quite certain, did my parents—who, to interest their
three teenage sons, subscribed to a popular natural history journal that accepted
evolution as a fact. Indeed, in Germany at that time there was no Protestant fundamentalism.
And after I had entered university, no one raised any questions about evolution,
either in my medical curriculum or in my preparations for the Ph.D. Those who were
unable to adopt creation as a plausible solution for biological diversity concluded
that evolution was the only rational explanation for the living world.’11

Various atheopaths have pointed to the belt buckles in Hitler’s army as alleged
proof of his Christianity, since they said ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God
with us’). However, this was merely the traditional slogan of the main German
armed forces or Wehrmacht (‘defence force’), a slogan dating
inherited from Kaiser’s Imperial standard of 1870. Such buckles are found
in German WW1 uniforms too, so atheopaths (and some of their compromising churchian
allies) are simply ignorant to claim that they are Nazi insignia. Furthermore, the
Wehrmacht for a long time banned soldiers from being members of any
political party (the Nazis lifted this ban), so it was not a Nazi army by definition.
So the presence of ‘Gott mit uns’ means little more than these
same atheopaths using American money with the motto ‘In God We Trust’.
As further evidence, the genuine Nazi army, the Waffen SS, replaced
‘Gott mit uns’ with ‘Meine Ehre heißt Treue’
(‘My honor is named loyalty’). (Waffen SS = armed SS, where SS
was Hitler’s paramilitary organization the Schutzstaffel, ‘Protective
Squadron’).

German culture

Finally, data on the culture of Germans both home and abroad also shatters the link
between Lutheranism and Nazism. Dr Thomas Sowell has documented this in detail,
without any stake in the creation-evolution issue, in the chapter ‘Germans
around the world’ in his book Migrations and Culture.12

At the conclusion, Sowell writes:

‘The dozen years of Germany’s history dominated by the Nazis cast a
shadow over Germans, at home and abroad, for decades after the Hitler regime was
buried in the dust and rubble at the end of World War 2. While the Nazi movement
exploited certain features of German culture, including obedience to authority and
a romanticising of culture and violence, in other ways the Nazis represented a sharp
break with more civilized aspects of German tradition. For example, the
racial fanaticism of the Nazi era in Germany was in sharp contrast to the historic
tolerant cosmopolitanism of Germans in the Baltic and Czechoslovakia, or
the German antislavery position in Brazil and in the United States, their ability
to get along with the indigenous American Indians in the Western Hemisphere, their
charitable efforts toward the aborigines in Australia. Group prejudice and discrimination
were by no means unknown among Germans, at home and abroad, but it tended to be
less rather than more prevalent, as compared to other Europeans—or
to Asians or Africans, for that matter.’13

Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of
nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development
which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.—Hannah
Arendt

Sowell also documented how Jews in Germany were the most assimilated in Europe:
very patriotic, serving their country in WW1, and calling themselves ‘Germans
of the Mosaic Faith’. Overseas, it was the same story. In the 19th
century USA, German immigrants formed German cultural associations, and welcomed
German Jews, e.g. to the Turnvereine (singing groups).

One characteristic of overseas Germans was loyalty to the new country.
This is largely because they came from different German-speaking regions of Europe
before Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) had unified them into one country. Yet
the Germans retained cultural characteristics such as hard work, honesty, skill
in farming and technology, music, optics, brewing. So the Germans generally had
cultural loyalty not nationalistic loyalty.

One special skill Germans brought was military. In fact, a number of great
military leaders who fought against Germany were of German extraction. In WW1, General
John Pershing (Pfoerschin) led the American troops; while the leading Australian
General, John Monash (Monasch) of German Jewish ancestry, invented new strategy
at the
Battle of Hamel which largely helped to win the war, and was the first commander
in 200 years to be personally knighted by a British monarch on a battlefield. In
WW2, General Dwight Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) led the Allied forces in Europe, General
Carl Spaatz’s bombers pulverized much of Germany, and Admiral Chester Nimitz
commanded the Pacific Fleet.

Furthermore, in Australia, the Germans were overwhelmingly Lutheran, in two main
branches. The United Evangelical Lutheran Church maintained ties to Germany where
most of its pastors came from, while the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Australia
developed ties with the theologically conservative Missouri Synod in the USA.14

During WW2, Nazi agents tried to infiltrate German organizations in Australia. But
the Lutheran Synod rebuffed them, while the United Lutherans rejected Nazi ideology,
but more ambiguously. When war was declared, both factions urged their
‘members to fight for Australia and to cooperate with Australian authorities.’15

The above analysis shows that racial and anti-semitic ideas have not been part of
German culture for the most part. Yet Lutheranism has been a huge influence for
centuries on Germans whether in Germany or overseas. This suggests that Lutheran
churches in Germany and overseas understood the nature of trash talk, which is why
they and German culture didn’t take the antisemitism on board. So to explain
the Nazi aberration in Germans in Germany that was overwhelmingly rejected by overseas
Germans, it is logical to look to a more recent and localized cause.

Jews: misunderstood middleman minorities

Image wikipedia.org

Hannah Arendt

Why Jews? Dr Sowell documents a peculiar feature of Jews that made them easy prey
for unscrupulous demagogues like Hitler. He explains that Jews, as well as the overseas
Chinese in Asia, Indians in East Africa and Lebanese in West Africa, were ‘middleman
minorities’. That is, they acted as go-betweens between producer
and consumer, taking a profit; or were money-lenders. This led to many similar patterns
in these disparate people groups with no connection with each other.

One of the unfortunate similarities is the way that demagogues accused them of being
‘parasites’ who merely transferred what others produced, supposedly
profiting off other people’s labour. All these middlemen minorities suffered
much persecution. Yet these middlemen provided an important economic function, enabling
the efficient flow of money and goods. This was shown when demagogues succeeded
in driving them out (e.g. the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, Idi Amin driving
the Indians from Uganda): their economies collapsed.

Hitler’s Darwinian precedents

How strange that experts on Hitler noted his fanatical Darwinism, e.g.

The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) wrote:

‘Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the
law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural
development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.’16

British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955) wrote:

‘To see evolutionary measures and tribal morality being applied rigorously
to the affairs of a great modern nation, we must turn again to Germany of 1942.
We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for
a national policy. … The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained,
is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform
to the theory of evolution.’17

Alan Bullock (Baron Bullock) (1914–2004) wrote in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny:18

‘The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.’

The bookThe Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin, 2003) by British historian
Richard Evans (1947– ) also argues that the eugenics movement and social Darwinism
gained wide acceptance among German élites starting in the last decades of
the 19th century. Evans argued that this new secularist world view overturned the
Judeo-Christian teaching ‘of the sanctity of marriage and parenthood, or the
equal value of every being endowed with an immortal soul …’ He documents
that the German Darwinist philosopher Alexander Tille (1866–1912) strongly
advocated the killing of the mentally and physically unfit and leaving congenital
children's diseases untreated ‘so that the weak could be eliminated from the
chain of heredity.’ Evans concluded that the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and
racial hygiene were extensions of this secularization of society.

It’s hardly surprising that Nazi propaganda films showed strong animals overpowering
the weak, and argued that humans should apply the same principles. One 1937 Nazi
film, Victims of the Past, showed a retarded person accompanied by the
narration:

‘In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural
selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even
allowed it to multiply. The descendants of these sick people look like this!’

See for yourself:

NB: ‘Sinned’ is a better translation of gesündigt than
the subtitle ‘transgressed’.

The German youth were also told to confess the same thing: ‘mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural
selection’. This is actually divinizing darwinian natural
selection. Compare the Gospel accounts (Matthew 9 and Luke 5) where Jesus told a paralytic, ‘your sins
are forgiven’, and the Pharisees accused him of blasphemy, claiming to be
God, since the only one who can forgive sins is the Lawgiver who is sinned against.
Their logic was sound, actually; Jesus was implicitly claiming
divinity. The same logic applies to the Nazis.

And in this religion, Hitler was regarded as a substitute Saviour—the ‘Heil’
in ‘Heil Hitler!’ may have been because it has connotations of salvation,
as well as wellbeing and healing; Heiland is the German for Saviour. For
example, a Nazi leader quoted in J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People,
said:

‘My belief is that our Leader, Adolf Hitler, was given by fate to the German
Nation as our saviour bringing light into darkness.’

Thus Hitler fits the biblical definition of an anti-Christ, because the
prefix αντί–(anti–) not only means ‘against’
but also ‘instead of’, i.e. a substitute, and Hitler fulfilled
both.

The most comprehensive documentation is by Richard Weikart (1958–), professor
of modern European history at California State University, Stanislaus, in his 2004
book From Darwin to Hitler19
and his subsequent article
Darwin and the Nazis). This documents how Darwinian ideas helped undermine
Judeo-Christian views of the sanctity of innocent human life, being made in the
image of God (Genesis 1:26–28, 9:5–6). Since Darwin taught
that man was just another animal, the German evolutionists replaced Christian morality
with a new evolutionary ‘morality’, where evolutionary fitness was the
highest moral good.

Evolutionists today claim that Hitler’s views were a distortion of Darwinism,
but leading Darwinists of his day didn’t think so.
Weikart points out:

‘[This] ignores the pesky historical fact that Hitler’s views of Darwinism
were pretty similar to those of Fritz Lenz, a leading geneticist (who called attention
to those similarities and bragged about it), Eugen Fischer, a leading anthropologist,
etc. This doesn’t prove that Hitler’s views of Darwinism were valid,
but they were in line with the leading Darwinists of his time … ’

Weikart summarizes the seven major aspects of Nazi ideology that were heavily
influenced by Darwinism, but on which churchian anti-Judaism had no influence:

Nazi eugenics policies, which led to the compulsory sterilization of 200,000 disabled
people, forced abortions for the disabled, and in 1939 killing the disabled (about
200,000 disabled people were murdered).

The drive for population expansion (Darwin claimed in Descent of Man that
the birthrate should not be limited, because a higher birthrate was advantageous
for evolution). Hitler often expressed the same view.

The need for living space or Lebensraum (this was one cause of World War
II, not just a minor feature). Hitler often expressed the need for living space
in evolutionary terms.

Racial inequality—Darwin and Haeckel argued for human inequality on the basis
of Darwinian evolution.

Anti-Marxism—the leading German Darwinist Haeckel argued that Darwinism disproved
Marxism.

History as a racial struggle for existence.

The evolution of moral traits—Hitler believed that Jews had evolved bad moral
traits, while Aryans had evolved good moral traits.

All these views were all upheld by prominent Darwinists on the basis of Darwinism.
They permeated racial ideology in the pre-Nazi period. Hitler also upheld them and
made clear they were central aspects of his ideology.

The first eugenics society was founded in Germany. It says a lot that evolutionary
currents were inspiring eugenics in both the USA and Germany. And from there, it
is a short step to euthanasia. One book written four
years before Mein Kampf (1924) and very much part of the German cultural
milieu was Allowing the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Life (Die Freigabe
der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens) 1920 by two evolutionists, lawyer
Karl Binding (1841–1920) and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche (1865–1943).
So it’s not surprising that Hitler’s tome said about such annihilation
of unworthy life:

‘It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently
will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole.’

‘There must be no half-measures. It is a half-measure to let incurably sick
people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones. This in keeping with the
humanitarianism which, to avoid hurting one individual, lets a hundred others perish.’

This could only have occurred because Darwinism had replaced the Judeo-Christian
ethic of sanctity of innocent human life with an evolutionary ‘ethic’.
Such abominable ‘ethics’ have not disappeared. Many of the same arguments
of Binding and Hoche are used by modern euthanasia advocates: compassion, saving
costs of treatment freeing money for treating healthier patients. And atheist philosopher
Peter Singer
defends abortion, infanticide and euthanasia (as well as bestiality), yet the academic
establishment rewarded these views with a personal chair at Princeton.20

An example of this mentality was Eduard Krebsbach (1894–1947), SS doctor in the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen. He murdered over 900 prisoners by lethal injection, and was hanged as a war criminal. Here is a dialogue from the war crimes trial, cited from Hans Maršálek, Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, p. 174:

Krebsbach: When I started work I was ordered by the head of Office III D to kill or have killed all those who were unable to work, and the incurably sick.

Prosecutor: And how did you carry out this order?

Krebsbach:Incurably sick inmates who were absolutely incapable of work were generally gassed. Some were also killed by benzene injection.

Prosecutor: To your knowledge, how many persons were killed in this way in your presence?

Krebsbach: (no answer)

Prosecutor: You were ordered to kill those unfit to live?

Krebsbach: Yes. I was ordered to have persons killed if I was of the opinion that they were a burden on the state.

Prosecutor: Did it never occur to you that these were human beings, people who had the misfortune to be inmates or who had been neglected?

Krebsbach: No. People are like animals. Animals that are born deformed or incapable of living are put down at birth. This should be done for humanitarian reasons with people as well. This would prevent a lot of misery and unhappiness.

Prosecutor: That is your opinion. The world does not agree with you. Did it never occur to you that killing a human being is a terrible crime?

Krebsbach:No. Every state is entitled to protect itself against asocial persons including those unfit to live.

Prosecutor: In other words, it never occurred to you that what you were doing was a crime?

Krebsbach: No. I carried out my work to the best of my knowledge and belief because I had to.

Dr Augusto Zimmerman, Law Lecturer at Murdoch University, Western Australia, has
documented how Darwinian ideas even infested the German juridical system with ‘legal
positivism’, and left them with no resistance to Nazism.21 He writes:

‘The idea that human law was to be subject to God’s law began to be
more deeply challenged in the 19th century, when Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution was interpreted as an attempt to promote a worldview that is
based on the non-existence of God. But whenever the value of law is entwined in
such belief in “evolution”, law automatically loses its transcendent
dignity, and the whole idea of government under law loses its most important philosophical
foundation. Whereas Christianity sees God’s laws as a manifestation of divine
reason and justice, Darwinism provides no transcendent basis for law, such that
legality is seen to be no more than the prosaic codification of a government’s
policies. As such, the idea of law is reduced to a managerial skill employed in
the service of social engineering, the dominant view in the legal profession today.22

In this sense, legal positivists developed a theory that “law” is a
mere product of human will, essentially a result of force and social struggle.23 To strict legal positivists,
any law which in procedural terms can be properly enacted by the state must not
be disobeyed or rendered invalid on account of its immorality.24 Thus, a legal theory was developed; one which
may be defined in terms of “a philosophy without metaphysics, an epistemology
without certainty of truth, or a jurisprudence without an idea of right”.25

…

‘According to the American law professor and Catholic apologist Charles Edward
Rice (1931– ), “when the Nazis moved against the Jews, German lawyers
were disarmed … by legal positivism”.26 Rice also says that this would not have been the
case had most of the German legal profession not fully embraced legal positivism
but had instead responded to the early Nazi injustices with a sound and ‘principled
denunciation’ rooted in traditional principles of natural law.

‘In this sense the Nazi legal system cannot be isolated, like some sort of
accident, from the viewpoints of the powerful legal elite in Germany. Though Germany
in 1933 had a constitutional order, the tradition of constitutional law was solely
based on positivist legal principles. Most German judges and lawyers were anxious
to establish an authoritarian rule that was supported by a legal system which rejected
any protection of the individual against the state. Such lawyers had been hostile
to the Weimar Republic, and they generally welcomed the Nazi regime in 1933.27

…

‘In conformity to the Volks-Nomos theory developed during the Nazi
regime, the Nazi jurists denied the existence of any individual right against the
power of the state. In the Nazi legal view, Aurel Kolnai explains, law was not a
safeguard the citizen held against violence and oppression “but another means
of securing omnipotence for the Lords of the State … In a word, the object
of law was no longer to check but rather to encourage arbitrary exertion of public
power.”28 Naturally,
“such interpretations by highly regarded legal theorists were of inestimable
value in legitimating a form of domination which … effectively undermined
the rule of law in favour of arbitrary exercise of political will.”29’

‘Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the
Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work
of the Lord.’

Of course, Hitler was a master political opportunist who would say anything to get
into power, and he even said so in Mein Kampf. But any ‘religion’
of the Nazis was paganism. This is why Hitler loved the music of Richard
Wagner, who turned much Teutonic mythology into opera. Indeed, the swastika was
an ancient pagan symbol, and many Nazi ceremonies resembled pagan rituals.

Weikart points out that Hitler’s social Darwinist and racist predecessors
in Nazi Germany were opposed to Christianity precisely because it taught human equality,
in
response to a critic:

‘Actually, if you look at the late nineteenth century discourse on social
Darwinism and equality in Germany, you find that Haeckel, Hellwald, and many others
railed at Christianity precisely because in their view Christianity upheld human
equality. Whatever Christianity stood for before the late nineteenth century, the
social Darwinists of the nineteenth century forthrightly criticized Christianity
for its egalitarianism. Darwinists who opposed the “equal moral dignity of
all human beings” were forthrightly critical of Christianity, which they thought
did uphold the sanctity of life for all. If you want to argue that Christianity
is not egalitarian, fine, do so. But then you are arguing against fellow (nineteenth-century)
Darwinists.

…

‘Again, what is interesting is that the Darwinists of the nineteenth century
who attacked the sanctity-of-life ethic were convinced that they were attacking
a Christian position … ’

It’s also notable that Hitler would never have risen to power without the
support of the SA (Sturmabteilung) or Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm
(1887–1934). Yet in his huge volume on Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich, journalist and historian William Shirer (1904–1993)
describes Röhm as ‘a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional
soldier…[and] like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual.’30 Of course, it is not politically
correct to mention this connection.

But as for Christianity, biographer Bullock wrote that Hitler:

‘had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarding it as a religion fit
only for slaves and detesting its ethics.’

Indian-born American author Dinesh D’Souza (1961– ) writes:

Image wikipedia.org

Winston Churchill (1874–1965)

‘In his multi-volume history of the Third Reich, historian Richard Evans writes
that “the Nazis regarded the churches as the strongest and toughest reservoirs
of ideological opposition to the principles they believed in.” Once Hitler
and the Nazis came to power, they launched a ruthless drive to subdue and weaken
the Christian churches in Germany. Evans points out that after 1937 the policies
of Hitler’s government became increasingly anti-religious.

The Nazis stopped celebrating Christmas, and the Hitler Youth recited a prayer thanking
the Fuhrer rather than God for their blessings. Clergy regarded as “troublemakers”
were ordered not to preach, hundreds of them were imprisoned, and many were simply
murdered. Churches were under constant Gestapo surveillance. The Nazis closed religious
schools, forced Christian organizations to disband, dismissed civil servants who
were practicing Christians, confiscated church property, and censored religious
newspapers. Poor Sam Harris [atheist propagandist] cannot explain how an ideology
that Hitler and his associates perceived as a repudiation of Christianity can be
portrayed as a “culmination” of Christianity.31

And the Chief U.S. Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson (1892–1954), declared
that ‘The Nazi Party always was predominantly anti-Christian in its ideology’,
and ‘carried out a systematic and relentless repression of all Christian sects
and churches.’32

There can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power,
that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous
paganism …—Winston Churchill

‘ … there can never be friendship between the British democracy and
the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward
course by a barbarous paganism, which derives strength and perverted pleasure
from persecution, and uses, as we have seen with pitiless brutality, the threat
of murderous force. That power cannot be the trusted friend of the British democracy
… ’

Not only should we judge his actions rather than his political speeches,
but it’s also relevant to see what he said to his closest friends.
John Baskette’s article
Was Hitler a Christian? documents the following from Hitler’s Secret Conversations
1941–1944:33

Night of 11th–12th July, 1941:

National Socialism and religion cannot exist together…. The heaviest blow
that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s
illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter
of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. … Let it not be
said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was
in the natural order of things. (pp. 6–7)

10th October, 1941, midday:

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken
to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the
human failure. (p. 43)

14th October, 1941, midday:

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death…. When understanding
of the universe has become widespread. … Christian doctrine will be convicted
of absurdity. … Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity. …
And that’s why someday its structure will collapse. … the only way
to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little. … Christianity
the liar. … We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad
teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. (pp. 49–52)

19th October, 1941, night:

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew
nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.

21st October, 1941, midday:

Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer.
… The decisive falsification of Jesus’ doctrine was the work of St.Paul.
He gave himself to this work … for the purposes of personal exploitation.
… Didn’t the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the
same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity.
Today, it’s in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul:
the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St. Paul, and Mardochai into
Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our
soldiers can have no idea. (pp. 63–65)

13th December, 1941, midnight:

Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless,
nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. …
When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should
free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who
are immunised against the disease. (pp. 118–119)

14th December, 1941, midday:

Kerrl, with noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National
Socialism and Christianity. I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and
I see the obstacle in Christianity itself…. Pure Christianity—the Christianity
of the catacombs—is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts.
It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted
Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics. (pp. 119–120)

9th April, 1942, dinner:

There is something very unhealthy about Christianity (p. 339)

27th February, 1942, midday:

It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made
concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable
errors—but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot
do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in
the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. …
My regret will have been that I couldn’t … behold (p. 278)

Some misotheists try to dismiss these quotes as edited by the anti-Catholic Martin
Bormann. But would Bormann have dared to edit Hitler’s words while he was
alive? Note that Bormann was never found after the War and was sentenced to death
in absentia. And if Hitler really were such a devout Christian as some
misotheists claim, then how could such an anti-Catholic as Bormann reach such a
high rank? Hitler took no action when Bormann declared:

‘More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs,
the pastors.’

And why were Hitler’s other closest friends so anti-Christian? At the Nuremberg
Trial, Hermann Göring had no time for religion, and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi
‘philosopher’, declared himself an atheist to Gustave Gilbert, the psychologist
who interviewed the Nuremberg defendants at length.34 Hitler's buddy Benito Mussolini was also well
known as a rabid antitheist, challenging God to strike him dead if He existed.35

The viciously anti-Jewish propagandist and pornographer, Julius Streicher, complained
that Christian teachings have stood in the way of ‘racial solution of the
Jewish question in Europe.’ He told Gilbert that he had no time for ideas
of God.33

Christianity and Freedom

As a final note, the ideas of political freedom came from Christianity.36 John Milton, author of Paradise Lost,
also wrote Areopagitica: A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed
printing to the Parliament of England to protest against censorship:

‘For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life
in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve
as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred
them.’

‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable
creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself,
kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.’

‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt
her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse
in a free and open encounter?’

‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where
that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.’

It’s no accident that the countries in an atheistic grip have reduced freedom.
To show the connection between atheism and political oppression and thought police,
consider the modern atheistic apologist Sam Harris:37

‘The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some
propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing
them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary
fact about the world in which we live.’38

Related Articles

References

Leading misotheist
Clinton R. Dawkins often calls theistic religion a ‘virus of the mind’,
which would make it a kind of disease or pathology, and parents who teach it to
their kids are supposedly practising mental child abuse. But the sorts of criteria
Dawkins applies makes one wonder whether his own fanatical
antitheismitself could be a mental pathology. One has to wonder
if this pathology is due to a contagion that has spread the New Scientist
offices. Return to text.

Christine Rosen, Preaching Genetics: Religious Leaders
and the American Eugenics Movement, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004.
See also review by Grigg, R., ‘Hooray for eugenics’, Creation30(3):50–52, 2008. Return to text.

Peter Singer was installed as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor
of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values in 1999 and still works part-time
in this capacity. He also has been working part-time as Laureate Professor at the
University of Melbourne in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics since
2005. See also Cosner, Lita, Blurring the line between abortion and infanticide?, 2 July 2008; creation.com/obama.
Return to text.

Rommen, Heinrich A., The Natural Law: A Study in Legal
and Social History and Philosophy, p. 35, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1989.Return to text.

Rice, Charles ‘Some Reasons for a Restoration of Natural
Law Jurisprudence’, Wake Forest Law Review24(3):539–570,
1989, p. 567. In fact, just after World War II, the German jurist Gustav Radbruch
(1878–1949) made the same claim that a prevailing legal positivism had helped
pave the way for National Socialism. Return to text.

For instance, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), the famous
constitutional law professor at the University of Berlin, supported the emergence
of the Nazi power structures because he thought the institutional practices of parliamentary
government in the Weimar Republic did not provide for a strong and stable government,
and that they were unconvincingly justified by a mere faith in rational discussion
and openness. Schmitt, who developed a conception of law in which law and morality
are the mere products of a battle for political supremacy between hostile groups,
joined the Nazi Party in May 1933. Between 1933 and 1936 Schmitt produced several
essays in support of the Nazi regime’s most brutal policies.
Return to text.

Kolnai, Aurel, The War Against the West, p. 300,
Victor Gollancz, London, 1938. Return to text.

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Readers’ comments

Fergus M.,Germany, 19 November 2012

“How strange that experts on Hitler noted his fanatical Darwinism”

How strange that you’ve ignored the fact the Nazis banned Darwin’s books and the teaching of evolutionary theory …

… what is this new evidence that [atheist Nick] Matzke produced in his October 1, 2006, blog, that allegedly demolishes my thesis? He perceptively discovered that in guidelines for banned books issued by the Nazis in 1935, one of the categories of banned books were those about “primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).” Matzke then claims that Darwin was banned under the Nazis (once he concedes that it might just have been something called “primitive Darwinism,” so he apparently recognizes one of the huge problems with his claim but he persists nonetheless).

There are many reasons why Matzke’s discovery, interesting though it is, does not present a serious challenge to my own scholarship.

First of all, Matzke himself apparently realized that by modifying Darwinism with the word primitive, this list did not really mean Darwinism per se. Good observation, but then why does he persist in maintaining that Darwin’s works were banned? Darwinian biologists (and Darwinian theory) under the Nazi regime were promoted, not silenced. There are many good scholarly books that clarify this issue, such as Ute Deichmann’s Biologists under Hitler (Harvard UP, 1996)and Paul Weindling’s Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge UP, 1989). These works and many others show that Darwinian biologists thrived under Nazism. Hans F. K. Guenther, who was appointed to a professorship in social anthropology by the Nazi minister Frick after the Nazis came to power in the state of Thuringia (against the objections of the faculty there), was committed to Darwinian theory. Eugen Fischer, a Darwinian anthropologist and eugenicist, was named rector of the University of Berlin in July 1933, and he headed up the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, a leading research institute. In 1944 (that’s still under Nazi rule) the institute was even named after Fischer! Many other Darwinian biologists landed in important positions under Nazism: Fritz Lenz, Emil Abderhalden, Konrad Lorenz, and the list could go on and on.

Another problem for Matzke’s critique of my position is that just about all historians discussing Nazi eugenics, euthanasia, and racism have mentioned the importance of Darwinism as a precursor to Nazi ideology and policies. Also, most historians writing about Hitler’s ideology have discussed the role of Darwinism in his thinking. Many other Nazi leaders were enthusiastic about Darwinism, too. Sure, some of these historians may call it "vulgar Darwinism” or “social Darwinism,” or some other such appellation, but these still all had Darwinian elements of some sort. You cannot be a “social Darwinist” without first embracing Darwinism. This should be an obvious point, but apparently it eludes some people. …

Fergus M.,Germany, 19 November 2012

"but then why does he persist in maintaining that Darwin’s works were banned?"

Because they were. This is a matter of indisputable historical record. The Nazis banned Darwin's two works on evolution. See Section 6 of the 1935 Law on Proscribed Books.

Ernst Haeckel was the chief promoter of Darwinism in Germany soon after The Origin of Species had come out, and been promptly translated into German. Raised a Christian, he turned against it, especially scorning the Genesis account specifically for its teaching that all humans are descended from one set of parents (Adam and Eve) (p. 112), as this implied equality of all peoples [see also Ernst Haeckel: a hostile witness to the truth of the Bible].

Some atheists have advanced the silly argument that Darwin was banned in Nazi Germany. The exact opposite is the case. After the Nazis came to power, they promoted the teaching of Darwinism in the classroom as never before in Germany. (see Bergman’s Chapter 16, pp. 265- on).

Historian Daniel Gasman points out that, in no other nation did the ideas of Darwin develop as seriously. (p. 79). The proliferation of scientific literature devoted to this subject is telling. Before 1933, German scientists published 13 scientific journals devoted to racial hygiene and related topics. In the Nazi era, this exploded to nearly 150 scientific journals, many of which are still highly regarded today. (p. 81). Moreover, Darwinian-based racism permeated all aspects of German life. This was so much so, that Professor Robert Lifton called the Nazi state a biocracy—that is, rule by biology. (p. 106). …

Far from seeing Nazism as a misreading—much less misuse—of Darwin, German scientists enthusiastically supported the Nazis (p. 103), and there were only a handful of German intellectuals who dissented (pp. 128, 130). Nor was support for the Nazis a surrender to the inevitable. No scientist was forced to join the Nazi Party, yet more than 50% of biologists employed by the imperial institute did so. (p. 125). Back in 1938, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz joined the Nazi Party and dedicated his entire scientific effort to the furtherance of National Socialism (p. 125), which he publicly supported wholeheartedly. (p. 270). Decades later, in 1973, his willful Nazi past evidently overlooked, he (jointly) received the Nobel Prize for “discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns.”

Note added 8 November 2013:

Dr Weikart recently published an important paper, The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought, German Studies Review36(3):537–556, 2013. This includes headings such as Hitler and Darwinism, Darwinism in the Nazi Biology Curriculum, Nazi Anthropologists and Racial Evolution, Evolutionary Theory in Nazi Periodicals, and Importance of Evolution in Nazi Racial Propaganda.

One important section in related to the revisionist claims documents that the prescribed books banned Darwinism. In reality, they objected to the Haeckel Monist League for promoting international socialism, feminism, and pacifism, contrary to Nazi doctrine. The same periodical actually recommended that libraries acquire strongly Darwinian books, including Martin Staemmler's Rassenpflege im völkischen Staat (Racial Maintenance in the People's State); the infamous textbook Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene [Eugenics]) by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz; and Hans Günther's Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Studies of the German people).